The View from the Bridge

(a kind of blog)

Robin Ramsay

Big stuff or disinformation?

The most interesting and important collection of new

information that I have seen this year is at <http://www.

jancom.org/>. The jancom bit of the URL refers to the Justice

for Asil Nadir Committee and there is pretty convincing

evidence there that he got screwed. But I was most struck by

a document which claims to be pages from a CIA analysis of

the so-called Supergun affair – that bizarre project to build for

Iraq a ‘gun’ with a 750 kilometre range, which ended with the

murder of the ‘gun’s’ designer, Gerald Bull. A declassified but

redacted version of this report is on the Web.1 At jancom.org

is what is said to be three pages of the redacted material from

that report. And this is explosive stuff. In recounting the US-UK

(but apparently mostly UK in this account) covert operations to

arm Iraq and the subsequent events, it describes four

assassinations – Bull, journalist Jonathan Moyle, Belgian

politician André Cools, and one Lionel Jones2 – commissioned

by the late Stephan Kock, allegedly of MI6, and carried out by

British (SAS) personnel.3 This was followed by a vast judicial-

state conspiracy to cover it up.

But is the document genuine? We will probably never

know: the CIA certainly won’t confirm it. My guess is that it

isn’t, that it is disinformation; that someone spotted the

redacted section in the original report and realised they could

1 At <http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_

conversions/ 89801/DOC_0001469609.pdf>

2 His death is discussed by journalist David Hellier at

<https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?3063-

Stephan-Adolphus-Koch>. Hellier’s account there of researching some

of this conveys a sense of the anxiety it generated.

3 They are named in the document but I have no idea if the IDs are

correct and won’t publish the names here.

use it.

This is what makes me doubt it.

* Would a CIA report name UK assassins? How would the CIA

know who had done the killings?

* The jancom sites says ‘All the expert evidence indicates that

the CIA report is genuine. It matches the highly redacted copy

released under the US Freedom of Information Act. (FOIA)’.

But the front covers of the two documents, the official

declassified version on the Web (see note 1) and the version

offered by the jancom site are different. And even if they were

identical, things can be copied.

* In the opening paragraph the author – purportedly a CIA

officer of some stripe, writing for other CIA officers – refers to

the ‘Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)’. Would s/he need to put

MI6 in brackets for a CIA audience?

* Brian Crozier is described as a ‘UK Security Service (MI5)

agent’. Not according to Crozier’s memoir, Free Agent, he

wasn’t; and Crozier wasn’t shy about boasting of his

connections to the intelligence world.

On the Web4 is a 2012 account of these pages, in an

English-language Turkish paper, which says the document was

then in the hands of ‘an experienced intelligence expert

[presumably Turkish], who spoke to Cumhuriyet and did not

deny the fact that he/she had worked closely with the CIA for

20 years.’

So: in so far as we can trace the document’s origins at

this stage, it goes back to someone in Turkish intelligence. Asil

Nadir was a Turkish-Cypriot.

But read it for yourself. Some of it will be familiar if you

have read Gerald James’ 1995 In The Public Interest, and

James is quoted on the site. Andrew Rosthorn has pointed out

that some of it appeared in ‘Thatcher, Astra, Iraq & murder of

Gerald Bull’ in Intelligence 81, 8 June 1998, p. 1.

Bilderberg comes to Watford

Watford? Strange choice of venue: close enough to London to

4 <http://en.cumhuriyet.com/?hn=312960>

invite the demonstrators and the major media to turn up.

Peter Mandelson – now a senior adviser to the bank Lazard;

long way from Hartlepool, Peter! – said the abuse he received

passing the demo was ‘terrible’. He should get out more. So

hats off to those – in the UK notably Tony Gosling

(Bilderberg.org) – who have been working for years to expose

the Bilderbergers.

Two recent events have encouraged Gosling in his belief

that Bilderberg is some kind of central committee of

globalisation. The first was reports in Italy about a book by

Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy, Judge

Ferdinando Imposimato. He was quoted thus:

‘In this document, which I have quoted literally, it is

mentioned that the Bilderberg Group is one of the

biggest promoters of the strategy of tension, and

therefore also behind the massacres. Here’s what

Bilderberg does: It rules the world and democracies in

an invisible way, influencing the democratic development

of these countries.’

The document, though not yet available in English, was

written in 1967 by an Italian magistrate, Emilio Alessandrini,

who was later murdered while investigating the Calvi affair.

But since the ‘strategy of tension’ did not occur until the

1970s, whatever Alessandrini wrote in 1967 can hardly show

that Bilderberg was ‘one of the biggest promoters of the

strategy of tension’.

The second event encouraging Gosling was information

he received from HM Treasury when it refused his FOI request

for material the Treasury holds on Bilderberg. The Treasury

stated:

‘Some of the information in the readout from the

Chancellor’s discussions also contains elements which

are intended to inform future Government policy.......’

And in response to Gosling’s appeal against the refusal, the

Information Commissioner:

‘.....has recognized that policy development needs a

degree of freedom to enable the process to work

effectively, and that there is public interest in protecting

information where release would be likely to have a

detrimental impact on the ongoing formulation of policy.’

Gosling comments: ‘Hold on a second. Doesn’t the Bilderberg

official website (www.bilderbergmeetings.org) state: ‘…no

detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are

taken, and no policy statements are issued’?

Gosling has interpreted the references to ‘future

Government policy’ and ‘policy development’ as an admission

that Bilderberg makes policy, when it is UK government policy-

making which the Treasury official is invoking to refuse the

information.

The NSA/GCHQ flap

Welcome though all the information was, I found it hard to get

excited about it, mainly because we know in advance that

there is zero chance of the politicians on either side of the

Atlantic actually doing something about it. Personally, I have

assumed for about twenty-five years that all electronic

communications are, in effect, public.

There were, however, two interesting little snippets in

Foreign Secretary William Hague’s speech to the House of

Commons. He didn’t actually deny the central allegations: he

said they were ‘baseless’, which, to the legal mind – and

clever lawyers will have been over his text – is not the same

thing as ‘false’. It was a classic non-denial denial. Secondly,

he said, ‘There is no danger of a deep state out of control in

some way.’ Which must be the first time a British minister has

used the expression ‘deep state’ in the House of Commons.

War is peace

Douglas Valentine5 e-mailed a long list of quotations from

some of America’s senior spooks, generals, diplomats and

policy-makers, all pointing out that the US policy of

assassination by drones from the air and on the ground by

secret military operations, was strengthening not weakening

5 <www.douglasvalentine.com>

its Jihadist opponents in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and

Somalia. His final rhetorical question was this:

‘Consider in particular the final statement: “A decade of

disastrous US policy, which had strengthened the very

threat it was intended to crush.” And ask, is that really

so? Is it really intended to crush it?’

The answer, obviously, is ‘No, it isn’t.’ William Blum put this as

succinctly as I could in a piece of his, ‘Another Peace Scare’:

‘We have to keep this in mind – America, like Israel,

cherishes its enemies. Without enemies, the United

States appears to be a nation without moral purpose

and direction. The various managers of the National

Security State need enemies to protect their jobs, to

justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work,

to give themselves a mission, to send truckloads of

taxpayer money to the corporations for whom the

managers will go to work after leaving government

service.’ 6

Surprised?

Peter Doggett’s There’s A Riot Going On: revolutionaries, rock

stars and the rise and fall of ‘60s counter-culture (Edinburgh:

Cannongate, 2007/8) recounts how the Black Panthers

received their first guns from a student radical, Richard Aoki. A

few days after reading that I noticed in a review of Seth

Rosenfeld’s Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and

Reagan’s Rise to Power7 that Aoki had been working for the FBI

at the time. What would the American left have looked like

without the federal government’s involvement?

Brain waves

Three significant pieces warning us about the dangers of

electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile phones, their

towers and wi-fi systems. ‘What the Cellphone Industry

6 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18879.htm>

7 <www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/23/berkeley-what-

we-didnt-know/?pagination=false>

Doesn’t Want You to Know About Radiation Concerns: A

leading expert on health effects from cellphone radiation goes

to battle against a multi-trillion-dollar industry’,8 is an

interview with Dr. Devra Davis,9 and contains some fascinating

and alarming material about the cellphone industry’s campaign

to, as they put it in a memo, ‘game the science’. And they

have a budget of $250 million with which to do it. (If there was

no problem, they wouldn’t need the budget, would they?) As

well as describing the science, Davis talks about the fate of

various scientists who dared to question the mobile phone

industry’s assurances about the safety of its products. In an

earlier article Davis goes into more detail about the science.10

The third piece is Marko Markov and Yuri G. Grigoriev, ‘Wi-Fi

technology – an uncontrolled global experiment on the health

of mankind’, 11 whose content you can infer from the title.

Plus ça change?

Looking at Lobster’s website recently it struck me how far from

the original conception of Lobster it has travelled. Yes, some

themes remain from the early years: the interest in the elites,

conspiracy theories and JFK’s assassination. But what has

diminished enormously is the attention paid to the intelligence

and security services; and what is relatively recent is the

coverage of political economy.

I have stopped reporting much on the spooks simply

because it no longer interests me greatly (and, apart from

Corinne Souza, no-one else has offered me any material on

the subject). When this venture began in 1983 there was

hardly any reporting on the British secret state and it seemed

worthwhile to collect what fragments we could. Three things

have changed. There are now mountains of information in the

major media; there is no point in pushing this material at the

Labour Party in the hope of getting political action because

8 <www.alternet.org/personal-health/radiation-concerns-about-

cellphones?page=0%2C0>

9 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devra_Davis>

10 <www.huffingtonpost.com/devra-davis-phd/cell-phones-brain-

cancer_b_3232534.html>

11 <http://www.viewdocsonline.com/document/6kn1ey>

they will do nothing;12 and the secret state no longer seems

as important as it did in the 1980s.

As for the recent interest in political economy, I was

always interested in this but before 2008 didn’t feel it

appropriate to use Lobster for it.13 But with the big crash my

perception changed. The Labour left’s critique in the early

1980s of the malign influence on the British economy of the

City, with which I agreed, suddenly became extremely relevant

and I was glad that I still had, inter alia, my copy of the Labour

Party’s 1982 publication, The City: A Socialist Approach.14

And so, on with the political economy.

What do Osborne and Cameron think they are

doing?

When Cameron and Osborne took office I used to speculate

with a couple of correspondents about what they thought

they were doing. It was obvious that they had one eye on the

first Thatcher government which raised interest rates (and so

reduced demand in the economy) in 1981 while in a recession

of their own making. This was the incident which provoked the

letter signed by 364 economists, who wrote, inter alia:

‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting

evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating

demand they will bring inflation permanently under

control and thereby induce an automatic recovery in

output and employment … [P]resent politics will deepen

the depression, erode the industrial base of our

economy and threaten its social and political stability.’

It doesn’t take a whole lot of knowledge to recognise that the

12 In 1989 or 1990 a resolution of mine on making the intelligence

and security services accountable went to the Labour Party conference

and was passed without opposition. Formally, the absence of

opposition meant that my resolution automatically became Labour

Party policy. It has never been mentioned since.

13 It was present in my book Prawn Cocktail Party and booklet The Rise

of New Labour.

14 The key article for me had been Frank Longstreth, ‘The City,

Industry and the State’ in Colin Crouch (ed.) State and Economy in

Contemporary Capitalism (London: Croom Helm, 1979)

economists were right. Yes, inflation fell from a monthly

average of 12% in 1981 to a monthly low of 3.7% in May

1983.15 But any fool can bring down inflation by causing mass

unemployment. The free marketeers who are impressed by

this fall in inflation ignore the fact that it rose again in the later

1980s and was averaging about 8% in 1989; and they ignore

the fact that the Thatcher government’s economic policies did

precisely ‘erode the industrial base of our economy and

threaten its social and political stability’.

Osborne and Cameron had also been much impressed

by the experience of Canada where large cuts in state

expenditure had been followed by economic revival. In 2010

The Telegraph ran a report, ‘Coalition government: the

Canadian cuts model that the Tories wish to emulate’ on the

Canadian government’s experience in the early 1990s of

cutting state spending by 20% more or less across the board

in response to a large state deficit.16

In his Mais Lecture in 2010 Osborne referred to Canada -

and also to the experience of Sweden and said:

‘As Goran Persson, the Social Democrat Prime Minister of

Sweden who eliminated a huge budget deficit following a

financial crisis and a deep recession in the early 1990s,

used to say, “a country in debt is not free”.’

He also gave prominence to the research by Rogoff and

Reinhart and said of them:

‘The[ir] latest research suggests that once debt reaches

more than about 90% of GDP the risks of a large

negative impact on long term growth become highly

significant.’

So in 2010 Osborne and Cameron believed the Rogoff and

Reinhart research was true; and that Sweden and Canada in

the 1990s showed that large scale government cuts were

followed by economic growth in the wider economy. So no

15 Inflation figures from < http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/

datablog/2009/mar/09/inflation-economics >

16 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/

canada/7807047/Coalition-government-the-Canadian-cuts-model-

that-the-Tories-wish-to-emulate.html>

wonder they are in deep shit! First, Rogoff and Reinhart’s

conclusions have been shown to be false, based on errors by

the authors.17 (And are, in any case, refuted by the

experience of – for example – the UK economy after WW2,

which, with debts of over 200% of GDP at war’s end,

experienced low inflation and decent economic growth for the

next 25 years.) And second, the Swedish and Canadian

economies in the 1990s were not in a global recession and

thus their experience then is not relevant now.18 What no-

one on the austerity side of the argument has offered is an

example of an economy growing after large public sector cuts

while in a global recession.

Citythink

I like many of Simon Jenkins’ columns in the Guardian and

often agree with him. On 7 May 2013, he wrote this:

‘Meanwhile, Britain’s one world-class industry, financial

services, is in the sights of every jealous EU regulator.’ 19

Is the City the UK’s only ‘world-class industry’? No, it’s not.

And even if it was, at what cost to the rest of the British

economy did it achieve this prominence? This is the bit of the

story the City’s boosters never think about.20 One of those is

Dan McCurry, author of ‘The case for the City’ in Labour

Uncut.21 McCurry wrote:

‘The towers that I see when I look from my kitchen

17 See Paul Krugman on the failure of austerity < http://www.

nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/how-case-austerity-has-

crumbled/?pagination=false> and <www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/

johncassidy/2013/05/austerity-an-irreverent-and-timely-history.html>.

18 The free marketeer Centre for Policy Studies published a pamphlet

in January 2012, How to Cut Government Spending: lessons from Canada

and even they noted that ‘Canada’s economic crisis happened when

the gobal economy was reasonably healthy.’ <http://www.cps.org.uk/

files/reports/original/120111114741-2012Howtocutgovernment

spending.pdf>

19 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/07/david-

cameron-eu-referendum-now>

20 For a short introduction to this see Longstreth in note 14 above.

21 <http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2013/05/15/the-case-for-the-

city/#more-16374>

windows contain the industry that pays for our schools

and hospitals. We should appreciate that industry not

run it down. If we are to have an industrial policy then it

should include financial services.....

Although we do need to create space for other

sectors to flourish, it doesn’t follow that we have to

destroy finance in order to achieve that......’

Two obvious points: first, no-one is talking about ‘destroying

finance’. Regulating it, yes; reducing its influence, yes.

Second, while it is true that being highly paid the financial

sector contributed significantly to the state’s tax income, at its

peak that contribution was only 12%; and some of that,

perhaps half, is the domestic financial sector, located on

Britain’s high streets, not in the gleaming towers of Canary

Wharf. That 12% didn’t ‘pay for our schools and hospitals’: it

paid for some of them. And some of those paying that 12%

also organised the tax evasion and avoidance of the global

companies trading here which, I would guess, was significantly

more than they paid in taxes.

Eurobollocks?

For Simon Jenkins, ‘financial services, is in the sights of every

jealous EU regulator.’ Whatever the motivation of the EU’s

regulators, it is clear that as the present UK government and

any foreseeable future UK government is not going to get to

grips with the City and its global gambling, the best bet for

nailing the banksters’ feet to the floor lies with the EU. Which

creates a curious dilemma for me. I think the EU is absurd, a

menace in many ways, and I would vote for UK withdrawal –

were it not for the fact that the threat posed by the banksters

is greater than that posed by the Eurocrats’ delusory dreams.

So, come on, Brussels! Bring on the regulations!

It is perhaps not a coincidence that opposition to EU

membership in this country appears to be rising in step with

the threat to the City’s independence.

Let me recommend Neil Barofsky’s Bailout: How

Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

(London: Simon and Shuster/Free Press, 2012). Barofsky was

a prosecutor who was recruited to oversee the financial bail-

out in the TARP funds; and, as the subtitle suggests,

discovered that while it was sold to Congress as a means of

preventing mass defaulting on domestic mortgages, it was

mostly grabbed by the banks. This is an entertaining and

illuminating ‘outsider-joins-Washington’ tale. Barofsky, on the

inside, shows the reader that it was just as bad as it looked

from the outside.

Two pieces of mine, on politicians’ ignorance of

economics and Labour’s capitulation to the City of London –

largely recycled from material in recent Lobsters – are at

<http://taxjustice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/tax-justice-focus-

volume-8-number-1.html> and <http://www.newleftproject.

org/index.php/site/article_comments/how_labour_embraced_

the_city>.

Clean hands?

When Lobster began, back in the early 1980s, co-founder

Steve Dorril and I we spent a lot of time collecting little

snippets of information, especially about the intelligence and

security services (little snippets was all there was then). One

such snippet has appeared in a letter to the London Review of

Books. In a response to a review by Bernard Porter of Calder

Walton’s Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and

the Twilight of Empire 22 David Lea, former TUC official, now in

the House of Lords, wrote in the next issue:

‘Referring to the controversy surrounding the death of

Patrice Lumumba in 1960, Bernard Porter quotes Calder

Walton’s conclusion: “The question remains whether

British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted

to anything. At present, we do not know” (LRB, 21

March). Actually, in this particular case, I can report that

we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with

Daphne Park – we were colleagues from opposite sides

of the Lords – a few months before she died in March

2010. She had been consul and first secretary in

Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in

22 Vol. 35, No. 6, 21 March 2013.

practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant

head of MI6 there. I mentioned the uproar surrounding

Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the

theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it.

“We did,” she replied, “I organised it.”’

The sources on my shelves and on the Net do not stand this

up. Nonetheless, it is a noteworthy comment because if there

has been a single theme running through commentary from

MI6 and its media assets in the past 30 years it is that MI6

does not do assassination. Now, apparently, it is OK to boast

that it certainly used to do so.

DiEugenio on Parry

Jim DiEugenio took slight umbrage at my review of his book on

the Kennedy assassination in this issue. In that review I said

that he was very good indeed; and if further evidence is

needed to support that claim, it is supplied by his long review

essay on Robert Parry’s new book, America’s Stolen

Narrative.23 Parry’s book looks important. I will review it

further down the road.

Pass the tinfoil

In 1989 I met Harlan Girard who gave me a pile of

photocopied articles, among which were accounts of the

dangers of electromagnetic radiation (EMR). He also told me a

strange story about being monitored and directed by the CIA

using microwaves. I now have an entire filing cabinet drawer

of material on these subjects, which we might loosely call EMR

and its uses. Which explains why I still do not have a mobile

phone. (I should put an EMR-emitting device next to my

brain?) The evidence is pretty clear that they are bad for us.

But I do have a router. When I had a techie round to

install a second Internet connection for my partner, I was

talking about putting in a second landline to avoid the EMR

from a router. My techie showed me that I was already in the

23 <http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/30/dieugenio-on-parrys-

new-book/>

EMR fields of four of my immediate neighbours’ computers. In

an urban environment it is impossible to avoid this stuff. So I

went for a router. And the slow demise of the public landline

system means that I will have to get a mobile phone any

minute now.

Happily I am not electrosensitive and do not have to go

to the lengths of some of those described in Nicholas Blincoe’s

sympathetic account of electrosensitives and the hazards of

EMR in the Guardian Weekend at the end of March.24

Killing Olof Palme

At <www.oledammegard.com/StatskuppISlowmotion.pdf> you

can download a 1000 plus PDF pages on the assassination of

Olof Palme. I have only lightly skimmed through this so far and

as far as I can see there is a lot of interesting information here

– for example about the Swedish Masons – as well as a lot of

speculation. His analysis of the shooting and its immediate

aftermath is hard to follow and it made me realise how difficult

the JFK assassination material must be for those coming to it

for the first time.

Another Met spook outed

Mark Metcalf has written an interesting piece on his

identification of the Metropolitan Police agent who infiltrated

the Colin Roach Centre (CRC) in Hackney when Metcalf was

working there.25 This is of particular significance to Lobster

because this agent, Mark Jenner of the Met’s Special

Demonstration Squad, was there while the CRC was helping

Malcolm Kennedy, who was framed for murder by members of

the Met, about whose case Jane Affleck has written at length

24 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/29/

electrosensitivity-is-technology-killing-us> A recent interesting and

intelligible account of the physiology of electrosensitivity is at

<http://www.electrosmogprevention.org/public-health-alert/wifi-

dangers/wifi-emfs-electrosensitivity-es-ehs-physiologically-explained-

at-last/>.

25 <http://www.bigissueinthenorth.com/2013/03/there-is-no-way-of-

knowing-how-much-damage-jenner-caused/7622>

in these columns.26

Undermining Chavez

In issue 115 of his Anti-Empire Report, William Blum has a

detailed account, from official documentation published by

Wikileaks, of one of the American campaigns to destabilise the

regime of the late Hugo Chavez.27 When Chavez died there

was a deal of discussion of the proposition that maybe the US

had induced Chavez’s cancer. Much derision was pored on the

idea. Of course it is possible, not using chemicals or drugs,

which were discussed, but electromagnetic radiation (EMR).

(Was anyone monitoring EMR around Chavez?) The US

embassy in Moscow was irradiated in the 1960s by the Soviet

regime, resulting in the death of at least one member of the

staff, and kicking-off the US military’s intensive study of the

military applications of EMR.28

Stoned again

The new 12 part revisionist history of America by Oliver Stone

and Peter Kuznik is being broadcast in the UK by Murdoch’s

Sky Atlantic – a further demonstration (if one were needed)

that Murdoch generally puts profit before ideology. The New

York Review of Books got the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz

to review it and he devoted almost all of his three page review

to the Stone-Kuznik account of why vice president Henry

Wallace was dumped by Roosevelt during WW2 – obviously

the most important part of the series, right? For what it’s

worth, I think Wilentz makes a pretty good case against

Stone-Kuznik on this issue, but that hardly matters. The irony

(to which he and his editors are oblivious) is that Wilentz

accuses Stone-Kuznik of ‘cherry-picking’ ........29 26 In issues 39, 41 and 51, for example. An introduction to the

Kennedy case is at <www.red-star-research.org.uk/>.

27 <www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer115.html>

28 See <http://www.emfacts.com/2012/06/john-goldsmith-on-

scientific-misconduct-and-the-lilienfeld-study-an-oldie-but-still-

relevant-today/>.

29 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/oliver-

stone-cherry-picking-our-history/?pagination=false>

Inside Wall St

Nick Chirls was a young Yale graduate who, like 40% of his

Yale year (his figure), went into finance. He joined Lehman

Brothers just before the crash – and hated it. Chirls has

written a very interesting, short account of life at Lehman

Brothers before it went down the pan.30 It contains a number

of quotable sections. Here’s the most striking.

‘Unfortunately, what I eventually came to learn, and this

took time, was that what was really happening was a

simple transfer of wealth, more often than not from the

less intelligent and informed to the more so. I worked in

a highly opaque market. There was no price ticker

scrolling across our screens telling us what these bonds

and derivatives we traded were worth. In fact, no one

really knew what any of this stuff was worth. Which, it

turns out, is a trader’s field day. What this meant, in its

simplest form, is that these traders (or salespeople)

could buy bonds at the “market” price from intelligent

hedge fund managers in NYC and sell this same crap at

much higher levels to unsophisticated (but legally

considered “sophisticated”) pension funds and insurance

companies in middle America. What I discovered, quite

starkly, is that the part of Wall Street that I worked in

was simply transferring wealth from the less

sophisticated investors, often teachers’ pension funds

and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more

sophisticated investors that call themselves proprietary

trading desks and hedge funds. Of course, the traders

had all sorts of excuses and jargon to deal with this

truth. “Oh no,” they would say, “We are important

providers of liquidity that create stable financial markets.

We’re a crucial part of a system. And besides, if we don’t

do it, someone else will.” These are the lies that people

tell themselves so that they can buy larger homes.’

Iraq invasion: tenth anniversary30 <http://nickchirls.com/my-time-at-lehman>

Monday 18 March was quite a day for those of us against the

invasion of Iraq. On the BBC News Website, Peter Taylor

conveyed the central gist of his programme later that night on

Panorama about the intelligence failures which led the

leadership of the US and UK to believe – or pretend to believe

– that the Iraq regime had WMDs. Essentially: US politicians

chose to believe fabricators and ignored intelligence which

said there were no WMDs. In the case of the Americans, this is

hardly surprising: they were bent on the invasion and nothing

short of Saddam Hussein’s dismantling of his regime – and

maybe not even that – would have prevented the assault.

Apparently unable just to say publicly that ‘We have to to

support the Americans’, it was Tony Blair who needed to

persuade himself that the cause was justified by the

‘intelligence’ on WMDs.

The 18th also saw striking quotations in an article in the

Guardian31 from the heads of British armed forces at the time,

condemning the invasion as incompetent, ill-thought out etc.

Good to read, chaps, but I remember that nobody said

anything when it might have mattered. And nobody resigned.

Careers apparently come before the national interest – and

the interests of the armed forces.

Also reflecting on Iraq ten years on was erstwhile MI6

officer and now Conservative MP Rory Stewart, who took part

in the invasion/occupation. Stewart concluded:

‘The question for Britain is what aspect of our culture,

our government, and our national psychology, allowed

us to get mired in such catastrophe? Everyone –

including Cumbrians – should try to understand what

happened. We need to reform the army, the Foreign

Office, our intelligence agency, and the way parliament

debates war, to make us more knowledgeable, more

prudent, and more willing to speak truth to power. We

must expose not only the politicians but also the

generals and civil servants who failed to challenge the

31 Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Iraq war planning wholly irresponsible, say

senior UK military figures’, <www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/17/

iraq-war-planning-wholly-irresponsible>.

system, emphasise the disaster, or press hard enough

for withdrawal. We must recognise how easily we

exaggerate our fears (‘terrorism’ and ‘weapons of mass

destruction’) and how easily we hypnotise ourselves

with theories (‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’).

We must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge,

power, and legitimacy.’32

Cold War origins

In the previous issue of Lobster I referred to the US ‘faking’

the Cold War. That was glib and overstated. The US pursuit of

armed confrontation with the Soviet Union arose from the

interaction of several factors in a very complicated period in

world history.

The first was the plans of America’s ruling elite. Shoup

and Minter’s study of US wartime planning for the post-WW2

world,33 shows that the dominant role in that planning was

played by the Council on Foreign Relations, the CFR of a

thousand conspiracy theories. Those plans were that, led by

the East Coast internationalist elite – bankers and their banks’

lawyers for the most part – America would dominate much of

the world when WW2 ended and open it up to American

capital. Parallel to this the US government would lend dollars

to the world – especially war-ravaged Europe – with which

those countries could buy American goods. One of the key

figures in the process wrote in 1942 that the problem for the

US economy was:

‘how to create purchasing power outside of our country

which could be converted into domestic purchasing

power through exportation. In practical terms, this

matter comes down to the problem of devising

appropriate institutions to perform after the war the

function that Lend-Lease is now performing.’ 34

The CFR people thought this could be achieved by economic

32 <www.rorystewart.co.uk/looking-back-on-iraq/>

33 Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 1977)

34 Shoup and Minter p. 165.

muscle but underestimated the resistance the US would meet

from other nation states (who recognised American

imperialism when they saw it) and the resistance their faction

would meet within domestic politics. Although the isolationists

had been defeated during the early years of the war,

isolationist sentiment had not been extinguished; the mass

demobilisation of US forces at war’s end supplied millions of

men and women who had no sympathy for continued foreign

adventures; and there was a considerable body of fiscal

conservatives in Congress who wanted to see the state

shrunk back to its pre-war size.

The second factor was the fear of a return to pre-war

economic depression which was felt by everyone.

The third factor was pork barrel politics: by war’s end

there were many members of congress with military plant and

bases or military-linked manufacturing in their districts, who

made common cause with local business in seeking to

maintain spending (and thus employment) in their areas. We

might say that the war economy had created the military-

industrial complex and it was keen to ensure its survival. For

example, during the war the US aircraft industry had been

transformed by the production of 300,000 military aircraft. At

war’s end most of those orders stopped. Lockheed’s

President, Robert Goss, was testifying before Congress a

couple of months after the war finished that the aircraft

industry had answered the nation’s call during the war and it

now needed the state to provide it with new orders.35 A

couple of years later the aircraft industry persuaded President

Truman to create a commission to look at the problem. Which

commission, after taking testimony from the aircraft industry

and the US Air Force, duly recommended increased military

spending to prepare the US for the next world war.36

All these interests needed a new ‘threat’ to continue

with military spending; and all found it congenial to interpret

35 William D Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the making

of the military-industrial complex (New York: Nation Books, 2011) pp.

36 See Hartung (note 35) pp. 55/6. On the commission’s chief,

Thomas Finletter, see

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_K._Finletter>.

Soviet diplomatic behaviour after the war as threatening.37 A

crusade against communism could be sold more easily than

reshaping the world to benefit American capital. It was a

familiar theme: at the end of the first World War the US had a

domestic crusade against communism. Happily for all

concerned, the US had a president, Harry Truman, who, as

vice president had been excluded from the major war decision-

making, and was a believer in the threat posed by

international communism.

The crusade against the communist threat was

irresistible and those who opposed it were ignored or crushed

as com-symps, fellow-travellers, naifs. George Kennan, deputy

head of the U.S. mission in Moscow until April 1946, the author

of the famous ‘long telegram’ from Moscow, had the galling

experience of seeing his advice about ‘containing’ the Soviet

Union by political and economic means, presented as advocacy

of military confrontation. And so the Cold War began, driven by

the domestic economic needs of America.

Wag the dog 2

The basic mechanism of the American military-industrial

complex is simple: find or create a threat then provide a

defence against it. In the 1997 film satire Wag the Dog, a

‘threat’ from Albania is created. In the satire-proof America of

2013 the threat is North Korea. The Washington Post reported

on 15 March:

‘The Pentagon announced Friday that it would

strengthen the country’s defenses against a possible

attack by nuclear-equipped North Korea, fielding

additional missile systems to protect the West Coast at

a time of growing concern about the Stalinist regime.’ 38

Even though North Korea does not have a missile which can

37 A recent interpretation of Soviet post-war behaviour as not

threatening, and the Cold War as essentially bogus, is Andrew

Alexander, America and the imperialism of ignorance (London: Biteback,

2011). Alexander is a columnist for the Daily Mail.

38 <www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-to-

strengthen-missile-defense-system-on-west-

coast/2013/03/15/c5b70170-8d9a-11e2->

reach America, or a warhead to mount on it, it is a ‘threat’

nonetheless. Or, a more accurately, a potential threat. The

article reported Under-secretary of Defense James Miller as

saying:

‘Our policy is to stay ahead of the threat — and to

continue to ensure that we are ahead of any potential

future Iranian or North Korean ICBM capability.’

Tam and Cav

There is a very interesting obituary by Tam Dalyell of Anthony

Cavendish, the MI6 officer turned banker, friend of MI6 chief

Maurice Oldfield.39 Dalyell reports in his usual guileless fashion

that he and Cavendish were chums and Cavendish would give

him material with which to ask parliamentary questions. He

also tells us that Cavendish, though formally not with MI6 in

the last 40 years, informally was. Would it be overstating it to

say that Cavendish was running Dalyell? I’ll bet Cavendish

saw it that way.

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make

words mean so many different things.’

Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth and Project Censored’s Censored

2013: dispatches from the media revolution (New York: Seven

Stories, 2012) contains an anthology of stories the American

major media ‘censored’ in 2011/12. Except, not really: the

stories written about here have all been reported by the

American media somewhere. The book should have been

called Neglected 2013, or Underreported 2013. But ‘neglected’

and ‘underreported’ don’t quite have the drama of ‘censored’,

do they? No matter: our editors have found a way round this:

they have changed the meaning of censored. They are using a

39 <www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anthony-cavendish-

intrepid-intelligence-officer-who-fought-terrorism-in-the-middle-east-

8531488.html> I met Dalyell a couple of times. At our first meeting,

in the House of Commons, I think, Dalyell put his hand in his jacket

pocket and took out some rather tired-looking lettuce and offered it to

me. As you do.... Politely, I hope, I declined.

‘broader definition of censorship’:

‘...censorship includes stories that were never

published, but also those that get such restricted

distribution that few in the public are likely to know

about them. In sum, censorship [is].....anything that

interferes with the free flow of information in a society

that purports to have a free press system.’ (p. 30)

This strikes me as nonsense. We know what censored means:

it means suppressed, deliberately spiked (these days,

deleted). You can’t seriously claim that ‘censorship

[is].....anything that interferes with the free flow of information

in a society’, if only because it is impossible to define ‘the free

flow of information in a society’.

However it is not the first time those on the left have

tried to modify the term ‘censored’ for their own ends. This

item below appeared in ‘View from the Bridge’ in Lobster 36.

Lost plot

After Lobster 35 I received a long letter from John Pilger,

followed by a revised version of it, complaining about my

review of his recent book, Hidden Agendas in 35. With

the second version came a note asking me to publish his

letter without comment. I replied that I was happy to

publish his 1500 word letter but not without comment.

Back came the reply that my review ‘was not merely

mean-minded in the extreme, it was a gross

misrepresentation, and with an agenda’ (I confess that I

am still in the dark about this ‘agenda’); that by refusing

to publish his letter without comment ‘I was imposing a

form of censorship’; and I was now forbidden to publish

his letter.

By agreeing to publish his letter uncut I am

censoring him?

Action this day (not)

Boy, the headline was sexy: ‘Tax avoidance firms will be

banned from major government contracts’. Danny Alexander,

chief secretary to the Treasury, described the changes as

‘another significant tool which will provide a framework to

enable government departments to say no to firms bidding for

government contracts where they have been involved in failed

tax avoidance’. 40

Was something serious actually being done by the

coalition? Alas, no. The next day Professor Prem Sikka

noted:41

‘The proposed policy only applies to bidders for central

government contracts. Thus tax avoiders can continue to

make profits from local government, government

agencies and other government-funded organisations –

including universities, hospitals, schools and public

bodies. Banks, railway companies, gas, electricity, water,

steel, biotechnology, motor vehicle and arms companies

receive taxpayer-funded loans, guarantees and

subsidies, but their addiction to tax avoidance will not be

touched by the proposed policy.

The policy will apply to one bidder, or a company,

at a time and not to all members of a group of

companies even though they will share the profits. Thus,

one subsidiary in a group can secure a government

contract by claiming to be clean, while other affiliates

and subsidiaries can continue to rob the public purse

through tax avoidance. There is nothing to prevent a

company from forming another subsidiary for the sole

purpose of bidding for a contract while continuing with

nefarious practices elsewhere....

The policy will not apply to the tax avoidance

industry, consisting of accountants, lawyers and finance

experts devising new dodges......

The proposed government policy will not work. It

expects corporations who can construct opaque

corporate structures and sham transactions to come

40 <www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/14/tax-avoidance-firms-

banned-contracts>

41 <www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/uk-tax-

avoiders-wont-stop-new-policy?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487>

clean. That will not happen. In addition, a government

loth to invest in public regulation will not have the

sufficient manpower to police any self-certifications by

big business.’

The old lady’s best guess

Since NuLab began worshipping at the feet of the City of

London in the mid 1990s, I have been collecting and

publishing information on the City’s contribution to the UK

economy. Except ‘information’ would be overstating it: I have

been collecting guesses or estimates; there is no ‘information’.

In the Bank of England Quarterly Review, Q3, 2011, there is an

essay ‘Measuring of financial sector output and its contribution

to UK GDP’, the first table of which gives us the Bank’s best

guess: that at its peak the financial sector was about 9% of

UK GDP.42 It is widely assumed that of the financial sector

about half is domestic – our banks, building societies etc. –

and thus that the international, ‘world financial hub’ financial

sector was about 4.5% of GDP, at its peak. Which is not

insignificant but does not compensate for the loss of about

15% of GDP which was manufacturing, which successive

governments, starting in 1980, destroyed by pursuing the

economic agenda of the financial sector – the single biggest

mistake made by governments since WW2 and the major

cause of our current economic predicament.

The murder of Pat Finucane

I wonder if anyone outside the state has actually read all 800

pages of The Report of the Patrick Finucane Review by the Rt

Hon Sir Desmond de Silva QC.43 So far I have only read the

summary, in which these seemed to me to be the key

sections.

‘In my view, the running of effective agents in Northern 42 <www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/

quarterlybulletin/qb110304.pdf>

43 <www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc1213/hc08/0802/

0802.pdf>

Ireland was such a fraught and difficult task that it

manifestly required the support of a clear legal and

policy framework. I have established, though, that there

was no adequate framework in Northern Ireland in the

late 1980s. Accordingly, each of the three agencies

running agents – the RUC SB, the Army’s Force Research

Unit (FRU) and the Security Service – operated under

their own separate regimes. The result was that: the

RUC SB had no workable guidelines; the FRU were

subject to Directives and Instructions that were

contradictory; and the Security Service received no

effective external guidance to make clear the extent to

which their agents could be permitted to engage in

criminality in order to gather intelligence.

It was apparent that successive Governments

knew that agents were being run by the intelligence

agencies in Northern Ireland without recourse to any

effective guidance or a proper legal framework. (p. 11)

In 1985 the Security Service assessed that 85% of the

UDA’s “intelligence” originated from sources within the

security forces. (p. 16)

My Review of the evidence relating to Patrick Finucane’s

case has left me in no doubt that agents of the State

were involved in carrying out serious violations of

human rights up to and including murder. However,

despite the different strands of involvement by

elements of the State, I am satisfied that they were not

linked to an over-arching State conspiracy to murder

Patrick Finucane. Nevertheless, each of the facets of the

collusion that were manifest in his case – the passage

of information from members of the security forces to

the UDA, the failure to act on threat intelligence, the

participation of State agents in the murder and the

subsequent failure to investigate and arrest key

members of the West Belfast UDA – can each be

explained by the wider thematic issues which I have

examined.’ (pp. 23/4)

It was this summary which gave the major media the phrase

‘no over-arching State conspiracy’ used in most mainstream

reporting. On the other hand, even those quotes I chose from

his summary show that this was not a case of state ‘collusion’

with the Loyalist terrorists. If 85% of the UDA’s ‘intelligence’

came from the British state’s agencies, with a British agent

(Brian Nelson) using it to target Republicans, the UDA was

being run by the state.

What is to be done?

There is a very acute analysis of the Newsnight special ‘Iraq -

10 years on’ by Nafeez Ahmed44 which concluded thus:

‘Ten years on, we need to be thinking about how British

democratic institutions were hijacked for a self-serving

geopolitical strategy invented by a tiny group of

American neoconservative politicians; and how,

therefore, we might ensure that appropriate reforms of

our political, parliamentary and intelligence processes

can prevent such a situation from re-occurring.’

Ahmed has misread this, I think. It isn’t that our democratic

institutions were ‘hi-jacked’. The House of Commons could

have stopped the Blair government’s move to war; there were

no structural obstacles. But doing so would have involved

middle of the road Labour and Conservative MPs opposing the

leadership of their parties (which is bad for careers); which

would have led the Labour Party – the government – to be

portrayed as ‘split’ by the major media and the Conservative

opposition (which is universally believed to be electoral

poison).

To prevent this sort of thing happening again would

involve two main things: electing MPs who are not afraid to

challenge the defence-intelligence establishment in this

country, and who are less concerned about their careers and

their party’s fortunes than they are about the national interest

(and good luck with that project!). Most importantly it would

44 <http://nafeez.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/seven-myths-about-iraq-

war-how-bbc.html>

involve changing the automatic support for America embedded

in this country’s political system and major media. This would

mean educating said system and media about the nature of

American foreign policy since WW2, which thus far the Anglo-

American left have failed to do.

How difficult this would be is suggested by the

comments of then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in 2005 when

responding to the charge that the UK was involved in

extraordinary rendition.45

‘Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and

that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind

this is some kind of secret state which is in league with

some dark forces in the United States, and also, let me

say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there is

simply no truth that the United Kingdom has been

involved in rendition, full stop.’

Is Straw a fool or a knave? I can’t tell. The ‘conspiracy

theories’ in this instance – ‘some kind of secret state which is

in league with some dark forces in the United States’, and

‘officials are lying’ – are true, of course. Is it possible that after

a life in politics, in which Uncle Sam must have loomed large on

many occasions, Straw simply doesn’t know this? Or, curiosity

about those areas not being good for political careers, did he

chose mostly to avert his eyes?

Dealing with the bog-wogs46

On the Spinwatch site47 there is an interesting study of the

British Army’s use of undercover military units in Northern

Ireland in the first half of the 1970s: essentially Brigadier

Frank Kitson’s attempt to use the methods developed in

Kenya and Malaya – pseudogangs, assassination and false

flag attacks – against the IRA. What comes through most

45 Straw’s comment was exhumed by Peter Oborne in a splendid

attack on the ‘secret justice’ proposals. See <www.telegraph.co.uk/

news/uknews/defence/9837251/We-must-shine-a-light-into-the-dark-

corners-of-our-secret-state.html>

46 ‘Bog-wogs’ was the term used by one of Colin Wallace’s English

CO’s in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

47 <www.spinwatch.org/images/Countergangs1971-76.pdf>

strikingly in this account are: the sheer incompetence of it all –

again and again these units shot the wrong people and the

rest of the state had to cover-up the mess they’d made; and

the almost complete absence of curiosity about these events

shown by the major media in Britain at the time.

Money, money, money

It was always clear that the government/Bank of England’s

policies since the great crash of 2008 in part entailed those

who were not in debt (savers) paying the bills of those who

were (borrowers). At its most obvious, interest rates paid on

savers’ deposits being less than inflation means the effective

devaluation of those deposits. As far as I can see this was

done to prevent widespread mortgage defaults. In testimony

to a committee of MPs, the director general of Saga48 –

described the policies as a ‘monumental mistake’:

‘Quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates have

hampered the spending power of those in the economy

who were not over-indebted and who would otherwise

have spent money.’

What I had not grasped is that these policies have forced

‘companies to divert cash into pension funds rather than

investing’. It works like this. Under Quantitative Easing (QE)

the Bank of England has ‘bought’ £375bn of UK government

bonds, or gilts, with newly created electronic money. It now

owns almost a third of all gilts in the market. This huge

expansion of demand has driven gilt prices higher but has

enabled the government to reduce the interest rate paid on

them to record low levels.

‘That has the unintended consequence of pummelling

pension funds, which use gilt yields to calculate their

future liabilities. When gilt yields plummet, pension fund

deficits effectively balloon. The National Association of

Pension Funds (NAPF) estimated last year that QE had

increased pension deficits by at least £90bn over the

past three years. Current regulations mean companies 48 Social Amenities for the Golden Age, SAGA is a British company

catering to those aged 50 and over (who have money).

must plug those holes. Mark Hyde Harrison, the

chairman of NAPF, said businesses are now having to

contribute to their pension schemes instead of investing

for the future, which negates any positive impact of

QE.’49

Fluoridation

Given that a section of the population in Western societies is

concerned enough about what they are eating to support the

‘health food’ and organic sectors, it is curious that so little

attention has been paid to the case against fluoride. That

case is restated in a shortish but thoroughly documented

account on the interesting Washington’s Blog.50 As

Christopher Bryson did in his book The Fluoride Deception (New

York: Seven Stories, 2004) the author there shows that a

false consensus about the efficacy of fluoride has been

created which survives because the evidence which refutes is

never looked at by the public health officials and the dentistry

industry which promote the use of fluoride.

Compassionate Conservatism

The always interesting William Clark has an analysis of so-

called ‘progressive Conservatism’ on his site.51

‘Progressive Conservatism, as a propaganda project,

has two strands: the first is to capture the language of

other parties to make the party seem progressive (this

functions almost solely through repetition); secondly it

seeks the obliteration of the distinction between elite

direction and democratic initiative — to continue

business as usual....The Progressive Conservatives (a

very small group) have taken this on as some kind of

further emulation of ‘New Labour’, using Demos and

49 <www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/29/qe-monumental-

mistake-pensions-experts>

50 <www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/02/government-and-top-

university-studies-fluoride-lowers-iq-and-causes-other-health-

problems.html>

51 < http://pinkindustry.wordpress.com/max-wind-cowie-progressive-

conservatism/>

other think tanks to fill the media with various vested-

interest-funded psychological adjustments.’

Clark’s site, Pink Industry, subtitled ‘’The Atlantic Semantic’, is

a treasure trove of information on the political and

parapolitical world we live in. He has done so much research,

he makes me feel lazy.

The banking crisis

The splendid Matt Taibbi has another piece on the financial

crisis, ‘Secrets and Lies of the Bailout’ in Rolling Stone 17

January 2013.

Taibbi concludes:

‘So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a

banking system that discriminates against community

banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to

Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business

lending and punishes savings by making it even easier

and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than

to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also

made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt

banks the official policy of the United States government.

And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another

financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that

policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the

markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute

now.

Other than that, the bailout was a smashing

success.

Although stated in quite different language, the Bank of

England’s Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial

Stability, came to similar conclusions in a speech given in early

2013.52

Armen Victorian

Victorian wrote a number of very good essays for Lobster; his

first appeared in number 23 and the final one in 36. I lost

52 <www.voxeu.org/article/have-we-solved-too-big-fail>

touch with him and have had no contact for well over a

decade. I recently noticed a 1996 essay of his I hadn’t seen

before, ‘United States, Canada, Britain: partners in mind

control operations’,53 which reminded me of what good work

he had done.

Uncle Sam talent-spotting

An interesting straw in the wind which I missed when it first

appeared was Jon Kelly’s ‘How do you spot a future world

leader’? on the BBC website in March 2011, in which Kelly

discussed the International Visitor Leader Program (IVLP), the

latest name for the sponsor of freebie trips to America for

people identified as potential political allies of Uncle Sam. The

article quotes Giles Scott-Smith, the leading researcher in this

field (whose book on this subject was reviewed in Lobster 43),

and me (though I am dubious about the words attributed to

me: they don’t sound like mine). But no matter.54 The fact that

this appeared anywhere on the BBC is, like the Charlie Skelton

blogs on Bilderberg,55 a striking change of emphasis for the

Corporation.

Hail to The Slog

The most consistently interesting blog I look at is The Slog

(http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/). Tom Easton pointed me at

this recent item on it.

Who is Cristine Lagarde really working for?

‘Over many months during 2011-12, The Slog

painstakingly put together a massive body of evidence

pointing clearly to the fact that the US weren’t

comfortable with Dominique Strauss-Kahn either as head

of the IMF, or potential President of France. Equally, I

spent many hours talking to those involved, and tracing

career progressions, in a bid to establish that Christine

53 <http://valtinsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/following-is-reprint-of-

famous-article.html>

54 <www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12880901> On Giles Scott-Smith

see <www.hum.leiden.edu/history/staff/scott-smith.html>.

55 <www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/charlie-skeltons-bilderberg-

Lagarde was being groomed as the head of the IMF to

replace DSK once he’d been framed.......and that she

herself was probably fully aware of this.

She was the perfect choice for the US Fed and

State because she looked and sounded French, but was

emotionally wedded to America. She was and is (as Tim

Geithner remarked in private) “Our gal”.

Unknown to many of those involved, while former

lawyer Cristine Lagarde became the Foreign Trade

Minister of the government of Dominique de Villepin, a

few years previously she’d been defending the interests

of US multinationals to the detriment of French

companies. She was, in fact, a member of the CSIS – the

think tank of the oil lobby in the United States….the

Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). She

co-presided over the Action USA/UE/Poland commission

of this think tank along with Zbigniew Brzezinski and

was in charge of the USA-Poland Defense Industries

working group (1995-2002).’

But if this can be detected by a British outsider (albeit one

with some interesting contacts within the EU) all this – and

more – was known by the French state and its secret

agencies. So why was it allowed to take place?56

Keeping on keeping on (all we can do)

Kees van der Pijl is the author of The Making of a Transatlantic

56 CSIS has featured in Lobster before. In the late 1970s it became a

kind of refuge for CIA officers who had lost their jobs in the detente-

era pruning of the Agency. Fred Landis’ 1979 article on CSIS,

‘Georgetown’s Ivory Tower for Old Spooks’, is on the Net at

<www.unz.org/Pub/Inquiry-1979sep30-00007>. For more recent

accounts see <www.voltairenet.org/article30064.html>and

<www.powerbase.info/index.php/Center_for_Strategic_and_

International_Studies>.

Tom Easton reminded me that Michael Ledeen edited its journal

for a while and former Gaitskell era US labor attaché in the UK, Joe

Godson, operated from there with his European Working Group – Peter

Shore MP, Eric Hammond, Peter Robinson (of the NUT), Ray Whitney

MP et al.

There is no obvious evidence that CSIS is, as The Slog has it,

the think tank of the oil lobby.

Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984), written while he was at

the University of Amsterdam. Over twenty five years later a

distinctive piece of his, ‘State Capture and the Democratic

Movement’, on the economic crisis, has appeared on the

newleftproject website.57 Verso published a new edition of

The Making of a Transatlantic Ruling Class in 2012.

57 <www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/

state_capture_and_the_democratic_movement>. I also have a piece

on that site – who could resist being asked to write for something

called New Left? – <www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/

article_comments/how_labour_embraced_the_city>.